It’s not unusual for those of us who’ve summered at Lake George
to look back nostalgically at the pristine paradise of our
youth and decry the twin blots of tourism and development
on the lake today. Less usual, perhaps, is the knowledge that
these same conflicting sentiments could be traced in paintings
of the lake from as far back as the middle 1800s, providing
a surprisingly current rendering of the ongoing battle over
preservation vs. progress (a la Frankenpine).

With the Hyde Collection’s meticulously researched and organized
exhibition Painting Lake George 1774-1900, curator
Erin Budis Coe has taken what could easily have been dismissed
as a bunch of stuffy old paintings and made them relevant.
The show’s 40 or so works come from a diversity of museum
and private collections, offering a unique opportunity to
compare and contrast them, with informative and insightful
text panels to guide visitors through the exhibition’s four
thematic sections. It’s a fresh look at some very classic
work, accompanied by a nice catalog with good color plates
of every picture, and two solid essays.

It is interesting to note that the exhibition was created
in relationship to an overall census of 19th-century paintings
of Lake George that the Hyde initiated in the 1980s and stepped
up as this show took shape. Excluding Sunday painters, the
list identifies more than 750 works with a record of having
been exhibited and/or sold, representing a tremendous degree
of activity and interest in art at Lake George. It is from
this vast selection that the curator chose the show.

As could be expected, a lot of the work is by Hudson River
school painters: Thomas Cole, Asher B. Durand, Jasper F. Cropsey,
Sanford R. Gifford and John F. Kensett are the big names among
them (Frederic Church’s sole image of Lake George is absent).
Other, lesser-known figures in the school are also included,
most notably David Johnson, who specialized in the subject
and has three excellent examples in the show.

Rightly, a very large Kensett has pride of place at the start
of the exhibition. Not only did he virtually make a career
of painting the lake (the census lists more than 90 paintings
by him alone), he is arguably the most skilled artist represented,
and his 1869 Lake George, on loan from the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York, is impressive indeed. But even
the quite small Landing at Sabbath Day Point, Lake George,
c. 1853, is so well painted as to reach out across the
gallery and command attention.

This brings to mind a game I found myself playing as I viewed
the (frankly) repetitive works in the show. Could I pick the
ringers without checking the labels first? Or, in other words,
had the art historians gotten it right? Others might tally
it differently, but I found that, with few exceptions, the
best paintings were by the best-known painters, and the stuff
that just didn’t cut it—whether because of insufficient skill,
kitschy composition or cloying color—was by names known mainly
to art dealers, collectors and scholars.

That said, there are still some surprises. I found the Cole,
for example, much weaker than the work of his peers, though
this could be explained by the earlier period in which he
was working (Cole’s painting predates most of the others by
several decades). Conversely, two of the show’s most sublime
works are by the lesser-known Franklin Anderson and Homer
Dodge Martin; the former vividly renders a commanding private
View From Tongue Mountain in mist-shrouded shadow and
light, while the latter’s serene study of an orange-tinted
bank of low clouds verges on the minimalist.

A
favorite subject: Harbor Island, Lake George by
David Johnson.

Another
game can also be played at the show, by those who know the
lake and its mountains and islands particularly well, because
the artists often changed the features of the landscapes they
painted. A volunteer docent in the gallery took great delight
in pointing out to me examples where islands had been added,
or where a mountain had been moved to a more picturesque location.

Some of the later work in the show could be classified as
American impressionism. Pleasant Day, Lake George,
dated 1883, by William Bliss Baker is an outstanding example,
with its picnic party of boaters sporting fancy gowns and
parasols, and pretty reflections in the rippled water. In
a fun modern note, a golden retriever accompanies the group.

Other artists stand out by taking a more unique approach to
the standard subject matter, such as Martin Johnson Heade,
whose beautifully painted 1862 view shimmers with warm light
on a curiously parched landscape—in sharp contrast to the
lush verdancy of most of the other paintings in the show.

Atmospherics are a hallmark of Gifford’s work; here, two fine
examples represent his particular compositional bravura in
capturing the drama of approaching storms. One is identified
as a study, though it features nice, crisp details of fleeing
boaters. The other is truly a masterpiece, as evidenced not
only by its scale and degree of polish, but also by its fantastic,
almost sculptural, geometric frame. Not surprisingly, A
Coming Storm has been borrowed from a major museum, the
Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Additional material augments the paintings, including illustrated
books; watercolors, etchings and a diary by John Henry Hill,
an amateur artist who lived an isolated existence by the lake
for many years; and guidebooks and tourists’ collectibles.
The finest additions to the show, however, are photographs
by the legendary Seneca Ray Stoddard. His albumen prints and
stereographs from 1880 to 1890 are good enough to stand with
any painting in the show, and they play smartly off the best
ones by affirming the almost otherworldly beauty of the lake
as captured in the paintings.